Are Price Extension Better Than Sitelink Extensions?

Last month Google introduced price extensions, a new tool for brands to increase clicks by showcasing their best product categories and prices. It’s an exciting new feature that’s not only helping eCommerce stores generate more clicks but also brick-and-mortar businesses and service firms.

At this stage it’s too early to know the full impact of price extensions but the early results are impressive. So today we’re asking the question whether they can be better at generating clicks than trusty sitelink extensions.

What are price extensions?

If you haven’t seen or used price extension yet, they look like this:

Now there’s quite a lot going on there – the most obvious being prices designed to lure potential buyers. But you’re also showing product categories or services, much like you’re able to with sitelink extensions. Except you also have space for a short description of that product/service to offer more info.

So, essentially, price extensions are like sitelink extensions but with a bunch of extra magic thrown in. And our first thought when Google announced the new feature was how they would stack up against sitelinks – one of the most trusted ad extensions in the AdWords toolkit.

So how are price extensions performing?

For the last 30 days, we’ve been running ads with price extensions against those with sitelinks. Here’s how the two compare for CTRs and conversion rates so far:

CTR: Price extensions are the clear winner – almost four times as many clicks as sitelink extensions.

Conversion rate: Sitelinks still come out on top here – converting just over twice as many leads per click.

This is about as much as we can tell you without more time to collect data, but we already have some interesting takeaways. So far, price extensions are blowing sitelinks out of the water when it comes to click-through rates. However, sitelinks are still producing the better conversion rates for us.

This is interesting, because price extensions offer up more detailed information. So it’s no surprise they generate more clicks, but you would also expect them to achieve higher conversion rates too. More information, in theory, means more targeted leads and a better chance of converting after the click.

This isn’t happening for us with price extensions so far. So does this mean sitelinks are still the way to go?

Still more to learn about price extensions

At this stage we should mention a couple of things about the price extensions vs sitelinks relationship. First of all, you can’t have both show in the same ad. Second, price extensions can only show for mobile searches, while sitelinks show on all devices. And, finally, price extensions take up more screen space on mobile, which could also impact CTRs.

What we don’t know yet is how users interact with price extensions. We know they’re generating clicks but it seems like there’s more to learn about the lagging conversion rates. We also need more time to see how remarketing campaigns work after users have clicked on a price extension but not converted. So stay tuned.

All in all, price extensions have made a mixed impact on our accounts so far. We’re not in any hurry to replace sitelinks just yet, but keen to find out more about what price extensions can do. So keep an eye out for more info from us or get in touch if you have any questions.